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"Here's the thing about privacy: It's tedious. Rather than dwell on Google being accused of illegal wiretapping with Street View, or whether Facebook got explicit consent from users before a recent update in privacy practices, we need to evolve the conversation around the monetization of our data in the digital realm toward identity. "

"But when you dive into the code of Meitu, that's where things get interesting. Security researchers have jumped in to assess the photo editing app and found that it was indeed collecting information, including a phone's IMEI number (a handset's unique ID number), and sending it back to remote servers:"

"If you were born around the turn of the 21st century, you've probably had to endure someone calling you a "digital native" at least once. At first, this kind of sounds like a good thing to be-raised without the taint of the offline world, and so imbued with a kind of mystic sixth sense about how the Internet should be."

"During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of Americans will be forced to work, play, and learn from home for the foreseeable future. Such a massive shift will lean not only on shaky and expensive U.S. broadband networks, but popular teleconferencing programs that often don't quite work as advertised. Zoom in particular has seen a flood of new users, and the company's stock has jumped roughly 20 percent since the COVID-19 outbreak began. But as new users flock to the platform for work, they should be aware of a few things: namely, the company's data collection, its shaky privacy policy, and the fact your boss knows when you're not giving them your undivided attention."

"The reason is that routine big-data analytical techniques can now effectively manufacture personal data that is not protected by any of the measures we've used up to now. A well-known illustration of this is the way Target, an American retail chain, creatively collated scattered pieces of data about individuals' changes in shopping habits to predict the delivery date of pregnant shoppers - so that they could then be targeted with relevant advertisements."

"So, yes: the internet of things presents many new possibilities, and it would be foolish to dismiss those possibilities out of hand. But we would also be wise to approach the entire domain with scepticism, and in particular to resist the attempts of companies to gather ever more data about our lives - no matter how much ease, convenience and self-mastery we are told they are offering us."

"Now spool forward to the present. One of the things that baffles me is why more people are not alarmed by what Edward Snowden has been telling us about the scale and intrusiveness of internet surveillance. My hunch is that this is partly because - strangely - people can't relate the revelations to things they personally understand."

""Face recognition … might be the thorniest issue, where the benefits are so clear, and the risks are so clear, and we don't know where to balance those things." Excuse me? What kind of benefits could possibly balance the risk of making life extremely easy for stalkers and creeps? Well, Bosworth later said on Twitter, it could help people with prosopagnosia, a neurological condition where you can't recognize people's faces. More generally, Bosworth said, it would be super handy when you run into someone at a party and can't remember their name. Ah yes, I can totally see how avoiding a little social awkwardness balances out the whole stalker thing!"

"It happened when Hello Kitty's fan site, SanrioTown.com, had its database accessed in late 2015. Here's the catch - it wasn't hacked. According to security researcher Chris Vickery of Kromtech, no hack was necessary. Vickery stated that pretty much anyone could access, "…first and last names, birthday…, gender, country of origin, email addresses, unsalted SHA-1 password hashes, password hint questions, their corresponding answers…," and more."

"This RFID-enabled device allowed its proud new owners to do things such as log into their computer, open doors and purchase food in the office cafeteria with a flick of the wrist. Nearly half of the company's 85 workers had the device implanted when the firm held a "chip party". YIKES!

"Schools in the UK have experimented with fingerprinting pupils then using that data for tasks including library books and lunch payments. However, the European Commission has questioned the practice, including whether schools can make it compulsory and whether parents can challenge it in court."

"RECHO DOES ONE very simple, little thing: It lets you leave a voice message tied to a location. When other people using the app hit those coordinates, Recho will tell them there's something to listen to. You can use the app to discover different "rechoes" around you, if you actively want to listen in on someone's location-aware thoughts. You can also share interesting soundbytes with your Recho followers. It's a little weird and novel, but ultimately a new way to think about digital exploring a place."

The access point itself will allow multiple devices to hook up to it so they can all share files with each other on a private little network. Then, for fun, the whole thing is shrunk down and stuffed inside a small notebook so you can stealthily share files anywhere. It's a little over the top, but fun nonetheless. Head over to Node for the full guide.

"But the bigger problem with things like public tweets is that no-one knows what information can be derived from them, either now or in the future. I write as a data analyst who's done a fair bit of work with this kind of material. What follows are a few techniques that aren't at all obvious to the average Twitter user. They go far beyond reading the surface text (or metadata) of an individual tweet. And these are just some of the techniques currently used to mine this data, ethically or unethically, legally or illegally."

"Marlinspike's Textsecure has an impeccable reputation as a secure platform, and Whatsapp founder Jan Koum attributes his desire to add security to his users' conversations to his experiences with the surveillance state while growing up in Soviet Ukraine. However, without any independent security audit or (even better) source-code publication, we have to take the company's word that it has done the right thing and that it's done it correctly."

"Shodan is a search engine for the Internet of Things, scanning the public Internet for devices communicating on ports and over protocols that are commonly used by IoT devices. By feeding it the right parameters -- Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP, port 554) -- you can find innumerable publicly shared webcams, ranging from CCTVs that oversee marijuana grow-ops and many, many baby-monitors. "

"So when I discovered the pocket of Instagram where you can find out what it thinks you're interested in (on the app, you'll find it under Settings> Security> Access data > Ads), I obviously felt it my duty as a netizen to see what dark insights it had into my private soul. Here goes: jewellery; luxury goods; electronic music; love; emotions; fashion design; crafts. I mean: no offence, Kraftwerk (and loved ones) but I could not name eight things I am less interested in. Maybe oxbow lakes."

"As of this summer, though, Sift does have a file on you, which it can produce upon request. I got mine, and I found it shocking: More than 400 pages long, it contained all the messages I'd ever sent to hosts on Airbnb; years of Yelp delivery orders; a log of every time I'd opened the Coinbase app on my iPhone. Many entries included detailed information about the device I used to do these things, including my IP address at the time."

"But it is not just governments who will be interested in the results. The software is freely available and cheap. It is being distributed all over the internet of things, from intercoms to "home assistants". Once our faces are attached to the detailed digital identities that are already compiled by the advertising industry, any sufficiently sophisticated shopping mall will have a map of the preferences of everyone who enters its maw."